How five-year-old Pierre Teihard had a striking realization of life's frailty and the difficulty of finding any abiding reality which launched him on a life-time "search for permanent reality" was his following memory told in his own words:
"A memory? My very first! I was five or six. My mother had snipped a few of my curls. I picked one up and held it close to the fire. The hair was burnt up in a fraction of a second. A terrifble grief assailed me; I had learnt that I was perishable....What used to grieve me when I was a child? This insecurity of things. And what used I to love? My genie of iron! With a plow hitch I believed myself, at seven years, rich with a treasure incorrputible, everlasting. And then it turned out that what I possessed was just a bit of iron that rusted. At this discovery I threw myself on the lawn and shed the bitterest tears of my existence "
This was an intense child with an intense unusual powers of observation. He had leaned from his father an avidinterest in natural science. Even at this early age of looking for permanence in rocks and minerals, his choice to get his eventual doctorate as a Geologist had its roots in his love for things in the "biosphere" - a word he coined in complement to his notion of beings in the "noosphere" - as knowing subjects.
So, Pierre had turned from "iron" as permanent reality to "stones" such as amethyst, citrine, and chalcedony in his youthful search for "Permanent Reality". But there was a "metaphysical reality" - a spiritual reality - that was mirrored for him in his own mother. She lived a life in the Spirit. Her piety had an intrinsic influence on his soul and mind. He says of his mother:
"A spark had to fall upon me, to make the fire blaze out. And, without a doubt, it was through my mother that it came to me, sprung from the stream of Christian mysticism, to light up and kindle my childish soul. It was through that spark that 'My Universe,' still but half-peronalized, was to become amorised, and so achieve its full centration." (The Heart of Matter, p.4)
At 12 years of age, Pierre entered Notre Dame de Mongre and was a quiet and diligent student for 5 years. He learned here to "exchange his security in stones for a Christian piety largely influenced by Thomas a kempis' Imitation of Christ." [As a side note: while I was in the seminary for 8 years, Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ was next to the bible itself in inspiration because this work had Jesus talking to you about different things in the spiritual life. It was what all wanted: a personal relationship with Jesus where He talked to you everyday.] At graduation time, he wrote his parents that he wished to become a Jesuit.
As a Jesuit, Pierre dedicated himself to scientific investigation of the earth and to the cultivation of a life of prayer as did his mother show to him by her good example. Like St. Monica influenced her son St. Augustine, Fr. Pierre's mother influenced him in his quest for sanctity. But for him, a man must become fully human before he can become spiritual. Grace builds on nature. He became an ascetic pious Jesuit. He became interested in Philosophy as well. So Fr. Pierre had four eyes to see reality: his geological eyes; his theological eyes; his philosophical eyes; and his spiritual eyes that bended this earth with the divine: the biosphere with the noosphere. Thus he followed science as a legitimate way to God as he was directed by his novice master, Fr. Paul Trossard.
Teilhard in his work discovered the fossil tooth in one of his diggings that caused his name to become known to the scientific community. Teilhard's enthusiam [comes from the Greek "en-theos" - "to be caught up into God"] for the scientific study of prehistoric human life now crystallized as a possiible direction after his ordination in August of 1911.
In reading Henri Bergson's newly published "Creative Evolution," Teihard encountered a thinker who dissolved the Aristotelian dualism of matter and spirit in favor of a movment though time of an evolving universe. Teihard also found the word "evolution" in Bergson. He connected the very sound of the word, as he says, "with the extraordinary density and intensity with which the English landscape then appeared to me especially at sunset. - the woods seemed to be laden with all the fossil life that I was exploring, from one quarry to another, in the soil of the World". From Bergson, then, Teilhard received the vision of on-going evolution. For Bergson, evolution was continually explanding, a "Tide of Life" undirected by an ultmate purpose. Teihard would eventually disagree with Bergson with respecf to the direction of the universe. Later he put forward his own interpretation of the evolutionary process based on the intervening years of field work.
From 1912 and 1915, Teihard continued his studies in paleontology. He developed experise in the geology of the Eocene Period that earned him a doctorate in 1922.
Through Marguerite Teillhard Chombon, his cousin, Teilhard "entered a social milieu in which he could exchange ideas and receive critical comment from several perspectives. In these surroundings, Teilhard developed his thought until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
When the war broke out, Teilhard enlisted as a priest-soldier and became a stretcher bearer with the North African Zouaves in January of 1915. He learned the vulnerability and fraility of human beings. His search for "permanent reality" became more and more a joining the Earth to the Spiritual World.
From the Front, Teilhard wrote these words:
"I'd call it 'Nostalgia for the Front'. The reasons, I believe, come down to this: the front cannot but attract us because it is, in one way, the extreme boundary between what one is already aware of, and what is still in process of formation. Not only does one see there things that you experience nowhere else, but one also see emerge from within one an underlying stream of clarity, energy, and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere else in ordinary life - and the new form that the soul then takes on is that of the indiviual living in the quasi-collective life of all man, fulfilling a function far higher than that of the indiviual, and becoming fully conscious of this new state. It goes without saying that at the front you no longer look on this in the same way as you do in the rear; if you did the sights you see and the life you lead would be more than you could bear. This exaltation is accompanied by a certain pain. Nevertheless it is indeed an exaltation. And that's why one likes the front in spite of everything, and misses it."
(To be continued...)
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